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Comment by canistel | Hacker News Reader

See, you can have discourses on caste, you can deliberate as you will, but endogamy - marrying within your caste - is still the norm across India, even in the states where people are not that finicky about caste. Until this chain is broken, the shadow boxing on the sidelines will continue. Interestingly the Caribbean communities have somehow managed to shed caste, while retaining the Hindu identity.

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I fail to understand how marriage is anything but a justifiably personal preference. Jobs are a different story - you can't prefer one race/ethnicity/caste over the other for obvious reasons. Marriage on the other hand is very personal - it would be ridiculous to expect people to marry into other races/castes/ethnicities as the norm - it never happens that way in any part of the world no matter how advanced - people generally prefer the partnership of people that they share most in common with.

The problem with Indian castes being that caste ends up triumphing over personal preference. I personally know a couple of friends who were deeply in love but couldn't marry each other due to caste constraints enforced by their families. And it wasn't an economic issue either. The guy in question lives in SF and the girl was married off to some poor bloke from her caste.

> caste constraints enforced by their families.

But you would think with the breaking / separation of family system to due immigration, opportunities and general cultural shift it would be a lot harder for a family to marry off their daughter to someone else against her preferences? I mean surely if she wanted she could go away to SF to live with him? Hopefully violence wasn't involved but the whole parental wish thing worked because of family system, lack of opportunities and culture - so I am sure plenty of things have changed for the good even if it didn't work out in this one case.

Seems like an economic issue. Had she pure economic independence, could have done what she liked.

There is a lot of violent policing in India on who you are allowed to marry. Even if two consenting adults chose to marry, one of their families or both may not like it. These families then take it upon themselves to do everything in their power, starting from emotional blackmail and upto murder to stop the intermixing of castes.

> Marriage on the other hand is very personal - it would be ridiculous to expect people to marry into other races/castes/ethnicities as the norm - it never happens that way in any part of the world no matter how advanced - people generally prefer the partnership of people that they share most in common with.

This mentality is the exact point GP is trying to make. If your preference is for people of your own caste/race/etc. then those divisions will be reinforced. I don't think anyone here is saying that you shouldn't marry based on your own preferences. Just that people not considering caste as part of marriage decisions would be a good signal that caste is losing relevance.

And the stateside anglo version of this: how many white college grads marry other white college grads? Worth reflection

After one of my school friends remarked that his mother only watched movies with two people who love each other but can't marry because they have the wrong colour dots, I began to notice all the Hollywood wrong-colour-dot storylines.

Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF6W1XD25Dc

The Caribbean communities have done this because most of the Indian-descended people there come from lower caste historical backgrounds.

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